Remembering Rob Reiner: The American President

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, where I'm rewatching my six approximate* favorites (see more below) from his career. Not to be confused with Remembering Rob Reiner, my other bi-monthly series that runs in alternate months, where I watch the six remaining films of his I haven't yet seen. 

While the other Remembering Rob Reiner series I'm doing in 2026 has been straightforward in terms of both content and order, I've been playing havoc with the content and order of this version. 

First it was excluding my actual favorite Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap, from the series, because I watched it a few weeks before the series started in conjunction with Spinal Tap: The End Continues. That left this series to feature favorites two through seven, watched chronologically.

Then it was having to drop the intended chronological approach when I couldn't get my hands on The Sure Thing in February. Still haven't gotten my hands on it. I have until December to figure that one out. So I shifted to the order I rank these favorites on Flickchart, meaning I started with my #2 Reiner film, The Princess Bride.

The last two changes have both come since the most recent iteration of this series in June, when I watched Stand by Me. 

The first of those was deciding to break the sequence of Flickchart ranking by not watching Misery next. I decided Misery was a better fit for the month of October, being Reiner's only horror movie. So I'd watch The Story of Us in August instead.

And finally it was deciding not to watch The Story of Us at all. That's no shade on that movie, which I like more every time I see it. It's that I just watched it in February of 2025, and wrote two different posts about it. In fact I've already tagged that movie six times on my blog, more than The Princess Bride (four) and the same number of times as When Harry Met Sally (which I watched in April). I decided I don't need another viewing and a fresh set of observations about The Story of Us only 18 months later.

That left me what is now my eighth favorite Rob Reiner movie, and one I haven't rewatched in ages, The American President. (I wasn't sure I'd ever rewatched it, but my records show it as a movie I've seen more than once, so I guess I have to go with that.) And in fact it's the last Reiner movie that I would say I have strong positive feelings about, before you get into stuff like A Few Good Men, which I respect but which has only a middling impact on me. 

So just so you understand the schedule:

The American President - now
Misery - October
The Sure Thing - December (if I can find it)

Caught up?

For the record, The American President is my #698 on Flickchart. So clearly a film I like, but not one I would describe as a personal favorite. At the time it came out in 1995, it was a great bounceback for Reiner from the 1994 disaster North, which ended one of the greatest imperial periods (to borrow the pop chart term) for any director in Hollywood history.

Reiner decided he needed to get back on track with something Capra-esque. Not only is the word "Capra-esque" used in the movie to describe Sydney Ellen Wade's first arrival at the White House -- when Wendy Malick's character tells Sydney the security guard won't know what the word means, and he corrects her by instantly name-dropping several Capra films -- but Frank Capra III, who would appear to be the grandson of the original Frank Capra, serves as a first AD on this film. (This is why it's good to pay attention to closing credits.) Though to be fair, Capra III actually worked with Reiner on  each of his nine films from A Few Good Men in 1992 to Flipped in 2010.

It was interesting to watch this film in relation to Dave, an even more Capra-esque film, if we're going only on an outsider's experience in Washington (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). I think of Dave and The American President as of a piece, knowing of course that I like Dave a lot better (currently #86 on my Flickchart). I watched Dave as a way of celebrating Joe Biden's presidential victory in 2020, confirming how much I loved it. My rewatch of The American President confirms that the gap between the movies is a bit greater than I thought.

I did enjoy my American President viewing, but I was definitely conscious of Reiner's political leanings as I watched it. See the thing that this movie does that Dave doesn't do is it uses the D word and the R word. Michael Douglas' Andrew Shepherd is a president from the Democratic party, and his most vocal critic, and potential challenger in an upcoming election, is the very Republican senator Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. The internet tells me Rumson is meant to be an amalgam of well-known Republican figures, though he looks most like Dick Cheney, which is interesting because Dreyfuss actually played Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's W. Certainly Rumson is meant to exceed Cheney in his ability to give rousing speeches. 

Of course Shepherd being a good guy and Rumson being a bad guy aligns with my own perspective on the world. Democrats are my heroes, generally speaking, and Republicans are my villains, generally speaking. There are some exceptions. 

But on this viewing I did feel a bit put off by it on behalf of conservatives -- just a bit. Although I do appreciate Reiner wearing his heart on his sleeve and leaving no ambiguity about his political affiliations, I also subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that a movie should be made with enough finesse that any viewer can see themselves in the protagonist. I can imagine that Republicans who might have been inclined to see The American President in 1995 would have been turned off by having their world view aligned with that of the villain, in no uncertain terms.

I think this might have bothered my wife more than it bothered me. When she asked how I'd spent the late afternoon on Saturday, when she was out for drinks with some of her friends, she was surprised to hear the answer, mostly because she doesn't know I've been watching Rob Reiner movies in 2026. (She doesn't need to be briefed on all this, and in fact, it's probably for the better that she isn't.) She then told me that she had actively disliked The American President, and she described its talky earnestness as one of the reasons, though I think she might have also hinted at its political stridency being an issue as well. (She's also coming at this from the perspective of making movies for all audiences. She's even more of a lefty than I am.)

So let's look at that talkiness. This movie is of course written by Aaron Sorkin, and you hear it in every single line of dialogue. This film was a prelude of sorts to Sorkin's The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006 and also featured Martin Sheen -- though this time as the president, not the president's chief of staff. 

There are benefits and drawbacks to the Sorkin approach. I think it works like gangbusters in The Social Network, in part because that film just feels so propulsive, when you take into consideration David Fincher's directing style and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score. It doesn't not work in The American President, which might be considered one of the progenitors of Sorkin's walk-and-talk style. But there was one particular part where I noticed one of these drawbacks.

Annette Bening's Sydney finds herself in a moment of intense emotion when she wants to convey how important the president has become to her, and she asks him not to say anything until she's finished, because she's going to stumble through it. Then she proceeds to make a statement that lasts no longer than 15 seconds and expresses a relatively uncomplicated thought without even a hesitation. 

Simply put, Sorkin is incapable of writing someone stumbling through a line of dialogue. Of course, a director can do what they want with his words, and Reiner could have directed Bening to stumble during that speech. But given the sort of co-auteur status of Sorkin in a typical project, I'm sure Reiner did not want to counter his style in that way, even if this was relatively early in Sorkin's career and level of influence. (I'll just mention that the pair also worked together on A Few Good Men.)

The Sorkin approach suffuses this movie and ultimately starts to erode some of our good will toward it. I think it's more a Sorkin movie than a Reiner movie, which doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it doesn't provide for me what I like most about a Reiner movie: its sense of human-scale warmth. That's at least the case in the three Reiner movies I've rewatched so far this year, but will naturally exit stage left in Misery.

This is starting to run long, but I did want to close out with some clear praise for the movie.

I continue to love the idea of a widower president trying to figure out how to have a romantic life while being in office. There are a lot of really charming occurrences related to this, to match the charm brought to this project by both Douglas and Bening. Presidential logistics take center stage here, and I always enjoyed seeing them in action. 

One thing I found funny, though, was the notion that a president would lose more than 20 points on his approval rating just because he started a relationship with someone. There's a lot of talk about morality in this movie, and it doesn't seem to relate to the fact that the lobbyist is trying to get his buy-in on a bill while also sleeping with him. It relates more to the mere notion that he would be having a sexual relationship out of wedlock, while his 12-year-old daughter sleeps down the hallway. Maybe this was actually cause for scandal in 1995, and don't forget, this was before Monica Lewinsky. But a single president dating an adorable lobbyist, who make a very photogenic couple, causing a scandal that threatens his very reelection? Well that's just laughable in the age of Donald Trump.

As mentioned previously, I'll return to this series in October with Misery. 

MIFF: Bookended by outsider animation, and Joe Swanberg redux

If you want to know what it's like to watch a MIFF movie at 7 p.m. on the final Sunday of the festival, well I'll tell you, there weren't any tumbleweeds blowing through Melbourne Central.

The last day of any activity, be it a film festival or the circus -- yes those are the only two options -- would usually entail a matinee show, then pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of town as quickly as possible. In the case of a circus, that would be literal. 

Not MIFF. Because Melbourne Central is an extremely busy venue anyway, it seemed just as much like it might be the first day of the festival as the last. My screening of the animated film Tangles -- not to be confused with the animated film Tangled -- was essentially full. 

As I've mentioned about four times during my nearly three weeks of covering MIFF, I wasn't supposed to go to Leah Nelson's film originally. At the risk of truly beating this horse to death, I'll remind you that I was supposed to go to Mile End Kicks on Tuesday night, but changed out the showing because I ended up making that movie part of my MIFF preview, and watched it through Apple rentals before the festival even started.

Tangles had made my shortlist -- it was one of probably 50 titles I shortlisted, anyway -- but I wouldn't have normally planned to go to a MIFF showing on Sunday, mostly because of the tumbleweed factor. I thought it would be sad and lonely to attend a showing in the dying hours of the festival, when everyone else is heading for the airport, metaphorically speaking. But this isn't Sundance. The people leaving MIFF are just getting on a train and riding 20 minutes to their houses.

But it did create a very interesting bookend, which is that I started this MIFF watching an outsider animation movie at the Hoyts in Melbourne Central, and that's where I ended it as well. It seems ages ago that I saw the Chinese animated film Light Pillar on Friday the 7th, and on Sunday the 23rd, I brought the festival full circle back to where I started. 

And going to the movie allowed me to have another funny and memorable MIFF experience: a second interaction with Joe Swanberg.

Actually it was the first, considering that I didn't interact with him on Friday night, for the first festival showing of his movie The Sun Never Sets, which he appears to have introduced three different times over the weekend. Only the first was at the Forum, and the last two were both afternoon showings in Melbourne Central, 1 o'clock on Saturday and 4:15 on Sunday.

In heading up the escalators to my 7:00 p.m. showing of Tangles, I was perfectly time to catch him on a landing coming down, which would have been just after his Q&A ended, assuming he had a Q&A for this showing. 

I made eye contact with him and he returned it. "Hey" I said, like we were old friends. He returned the greeting in the same manner before we both continued on our way. 

Likely he just responded in the way he always responds when someone sees him in public and realizes they recognize him. Swanberg is probably the sort of person whose face is not recognizable enough that he's always getting stopped, but when people do recognize him, it earns his respect, because it means they watch his movies. They are not just your average dufus on the street, though just from my few experiences with him this weekend, I sense he has an affection for your average dufus too.

About three seconds after this short interaction, I became emboldened to go give him some well wishes, to tell him I'd really enjoyed his film. I followed him back to the top of the next escalator, but once he'd boarded it and started to descend, I decided there was no value to picking through the people between him and me. The last thing I wanted to do was create a stalker vibe. So I just aborted. 

Okay but enough about Joe. He had his turn on Friday.

I thought I might be really walloped by Tangles, because my mother had Alzheimer's. Oh, didn't I tell you? Tangles is a bit of a personal memoir by its filmmaker, a lesbian living in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium, who begins a period of bicoastal living as she has to make it regularly back to Maine to check in with her family after her mother starts going downhill quickly. It's told in black and white with a graphic novel's sense of boundary pushing, though I suppose I'm just saying that because it's gay and a bit cheeky about it. Wanda Sykes plays the role of her editor at an LGBT magazine (I think that's all the letters they had in 1999), and she's not the only name who lent their talents to this. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices the mother, and other characters are voiced by Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein and Bowen Yang. Abbi Jacobson voices the character based on the director, though it could be Beanie Feldstein -- I can't tell for sure because IMDB doesn't have any of the character names. Both actresses would be about the right age, anyway.

And don't get me wrong, Tangles was great. It does what it does well. I just didn't feel the tears welling up at any point.

And maybe that's because the things that make me cry in movies are not necessarily the things that speak to my own experience the most. In that way, I think I'm sort of the idealized form of the critic, who doesn't have particular triggers that are based on his own life. I hope that means that I'm going only on the filmmaker's abilities to make a moment emotional even though it doesn't speak to me personally. It's either universal, or highly specific in a way that works without pertaining specifically to my own experience.

So yes I loved the way these characters are drawn, both figuratively and literally, and yes, it does have relevance to things I've gone through. But that makes it four stars with no tears, not 4.5 or five with sobbing. 

That's it for MIFF, but I did want to tell you that I had one final piece of business to take care of during this festival, and I took care of it on Sunday night.

As you know because I wrote about it last week, I do like having a double feature that includes one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie. I thought I'd missed my shot at that when I couldn't get into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on Tuesday before Rose of Nevada, but I realized I just needed to think outside the box. I'd be out of Tangles by 8:45 on Sunday night. If I went home then, I'd just fiddle around for an hour and go to bed. But if I stayed out, I could get to a 9:15 movie and complete the MIFF/non-MIFF double feature.

Because I'd had four beers and three margaritas over the course of the afternoon with friends -- forgot to mention that part -- I thought my stamina would be too shot to attempt this. But by the time Tangles let out, I knew I could do it, and hoofed it down to the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino for the showing of The End of Oak Street.

The best thing I can say about this movie was that at least it was brief, clocking in at only 99 minutes, which is nothing for a movie that features dinosaurs. In fact, that was one of its problems, that its pacing was so off, and that it felt like it should have been 20 minutes longer to flesh out the characters and land in a satisfying place where it felt like we'd watched a whole movie. This was like 64% of a movie and some very strange tonal choices. But hey, it got me home at just after midnight, which was just what the doctor ordered for the end of a festival that exhausts you even when you space your movies out. 

Looking forward to MIFF 2027 already! 

The sun sets on MIFF (almost): triple feature and celebrity sighting

When I set Joe Swanberg's first directed feature-length film in nine years, The Sun Never Sets, as part of my final triple feature at MIFF on the festival's final Friday night, I immediately imagined a blog post that used that film's title to farewell the festival for 2026.

Of course, I ruined all that by squeezing in one more MIFF movie on Sunday night, the result of having to cancel and reschedule a screening on Tuesday.

But I decided I could still use a variation on the title for the post that also features the American crime comedy Chili Finger and the French horror film Species, the latter of which fulfilled my semi-regular MIFF tradition of seeing a midnight movie. (Actual start time: 11:30 p.m.)

Little did I know that I would also have a celebrity sighting in terms of Swanberg himself. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I kicked off the daunting three-movie slate with a charcuterie board and beer at D.O.C., the trattoria in Carlton that I like to hit up whenever I can. I'd gotten in so many of my favorite CBD dinners during MIFF that I didn't actually know what I planned to do on Friday night, until I realized the 6:30 showing of Chili Finger was at Cinema Nova, also in Carlton, and not typically a MIFF venue. In fact, my records tell me that this is my first time seeing a MIFF movie at Nova, but I've seen maybe a hundred other movies there as this used to be one of my go-to theaters when I lived closer to the city.

Chili Finger is a crime comedy in the vein of a Coen brothers movie, though I might be more inclined to say that because John Goodman is a cast member. It's from a pair of directors who are new to me, Edd Benda and Stephen Helstad -- no surprise, as Benda's only previous feature was in 2015. 

It starts with the standard disclaimer about movies based partially on true stories. "Some of these things actually happened. The rest did not." The second line, which came up separately, got a laugh from us, because the statement is implied. 

The plot surrounds a woman (Judy Greer) finding a finger in her chili at a popular fast food chain, and the wave of consequences that result from that. In addition to Greer and Goodman, we've also got Sean Astin as Greer's husband and Bryan Cranston as Goodman's right-hand man. The cast was what drew me to it, even though this is the sort of movie that isn't a unique MIFF get. It sounded fun, and it was. Solid thumbs up.

After a walk from Carlton down to Flinders Street, which probably takes about 30 minutes, I had a quick drink at the festival hub in Federation Square. It's something I always like to do, and thought I might miss it this year. The festival hub was a little more subdued than usual, and I almost regretted my choice of a glass of syrah, because even though I'd opted for the smaller of the two size options, it was a heavy pour. In fact, I had to drink it rather quickly to cross the street to the Forum, the site of the old festival hub, and one of the classic MIFF venues. It is most often used for concerts, but there's an upstairs option for films, and that's where I saw The Sun Never Sets.

But not without my passing a red carpet where Swanberg was being interviewed. 

Any time you see someone being interviewed on a red carpet with all the bright lights and cameras, there's a tendency to view them as larger than life. But I didn't instantly recognize who I was looking at. And because I try not to be starstruck, whenever I can help it, I continued on toward my seats.

But then I thought: "That's not just some producer. That's Joe Swanberg."

And so I hung back and half-listened to the questions being asked of him for another minute or so. I was too far away to really hear what either party was saying, and I didn't want to geek out too much so I didn't linger too long. I did, however, get to hear some younger woman address him, which I thought was funny -- she didn't know who he was and asked his name. "I'm Joe," he said. He agreed to take a picture with her, which I thought was especially funny because she didn't even know who she was getting a picture with. As far as I can tell, she didn't know Joe Swanberg from a hole in the ground.

Someone like me should have asked him a question. Or maybe I'm overstating my own credentials. I thought I'd seen more than just three of his films, but I'm a pretty big fan of two of them, Happy Christmas and Digging for Fire. The only film of his I've seen that I don't really like is Drinking Buddies. I have to go back and watch the films he made when he was sort of founding the mumblecore movement alongside people like the Duplass brothers, Lynn Shelton and Andrew Bujalski. Oddly, this is my fourth time tagging him on the blog, which is funny for a guy where I've only seen four of his movies, and the fourth only just now. 

Anyway, Swanberg introduced the film as well with a very brief set of charming and humble remarks. I was sorry that I'd miss the Q&A in order to get to my third film of the night, but it would be pretty tight so there was no way I could stay. 

And the film was my new favorite of the festival. I was just in the grip of Swanberg's easy ways for the entire running time. The film features Dakota Fanning, giving her best work since she was a child, and Jake Johnson, who has really grown on me over the years, as a couple in Alaska who love each other but are at different stages of their lives. Johnson's Jack is already divorced with two kids, and doesn't want to get married again or start another family, while Fanning's Wendy does want those things but wants to kick the can down the road on acknowledging them. (And yes, I did just realize there might be some kind of weird Peter Pan thing going on with those names.) Jack forces Wendy to take a few months to reconsider and find if there is a more perfect match for her out there, otherwise her spot on his couch is still open. Of course, Jack doesn't expect her to pick back up with an ex-boyfriend -- or for him to so jealous that he realizes he's made a grave mistake.

There are more delightful complications in Swanberg's script, but what I really want to impart to you is that this is a throwback to a not-too-distant sort of cinema of the past. It's not mumblecore, exactly, but it's a comedic drama that is essentially focused only on people's relationships and doesn't really need to have a high-concept hook. It's just a shrewd consideration about how people act when threatened with the loss of something they hold dear, even if they were trying to do the right thing, and the hold the past has on us. Yet it's not ponderous, and I laughed a lot more than I would have ever guessed. It's bright and humanistic and the Alaskan setting, while not strictly essential to the story being told, gives it a special vibe all its own. 

The Q&A really did seem inviting, but I literally had six minutes until the scheduled start of my final movie of the night and a street still to cross to get there. 

Species, directed by Marion Le Coroller, continues in a recent line of films made by French women in which body horror is a key theme, including the films of Julia Ducorneau and Coralie Fargeat. In fact, it has some very literal overlap with Ducorneau's Raw, as it also features medical students as its main characters. 

Because I am now almost a full two days overdue on posting this post, I'll devote only a small number of words to this film that risks seeming dismissive. Actually I liked this film fine, probably better than that, but maybe I've just seen one too many movies recently involving people with flesh-eating viruses who indulge in zombie rage. And I don't mean to be reductive when this is how I characterize this movie, and it actually doesn't need to be more than that, but the script is a little thin on character development or other narrative deal. But there's some good gory squishiness and I'd say it fits the bill for a midnight movie, even if it's made with considerably more filmmaking skill that some other films that would get categorized that way.

I did think it was nice to see Karin Viard in the cast. If you don't know who that is, she was one of the apartment dwellers in Jeunet et Caro's Delicatessen. 

Since the French title of the film is Sanguine, they could have translated it as Blood instead of Species, but maybe that doesn't sell as well. Just don't expect to see Natasha Henstridge. 

Getting out around 1:30, Uber was the only way home, so that's what I did.

I'll wrap my 2026 MIFF coverage after a final film on Sunday night. 

The surprisingly effective elongation of Cape Fear

Martin Scorsese's 1991 movie Cape Fear -- and to a lesser extent, at least for me personally, J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film that inspired it -- established some really iconic cinematic elements.

Robert DeNiro's evil incarnate Max Cady was the sort of villain whose name you learn and remember, even when the names of hundreds of other villains, even the really effective ones, are lost to time. Robert Mitchum played that role the first time, and Lord knows he was very capable too, though I don't think his performance there holds a candle to his similar performance in Night of the Hunter. 

But then there was also Bernard Herrmann's score, which originated in Thompson's film and was carried down for usage in Scorsese's, albeit slightly reinterpreted. You can hear that score in your head right now as I'm typing this. It's super ominous, and for some reason it has a similar vibe for me as John Williams' score during the opening of the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The reason I attribute this mostly to Scorsese's version is that I had carried that one with me for more than 30 years before I finally saw the 1962 version in 2022. Inevitably, I didn't get as much out of that version. It goes back to my theory that if you love something, you're always going to like best the first version you were exposed to, even if you ultimately see a different version, and even if that different version is, by most objective standards, the better version.

Making it all a bit more iconic? One of the most beloved Simpsons parodies of all time is based on Cape Fear. And yes, I can imagine you are seeing rakes in your head right now, possibly hearing a little Gilbert & Sullivan. 

In any case, the key to why any version of Cape Fear works so well is its intensity. Over the course of 128 minutes in the case of Scorsese's version and 106 minutes in the case of Thompson's, we get to know plenty well this sinister ex-con with the chilling laugh, and also become satisfactorily acquainted with the family he's torturing. 

Couldn't work as well over 509 minutes, could it?

Well you might be surprised at the sustained intensity of the Apple TV+ version of Cape Fear, a ten-episode elongation of the essential story and dynamics that had twice been previously depicted as adaptations of John D. MacDonald's 1957 novel The Executioners. While we're doling out credits, Nick Antosca is the showrunner.

I think the reason I started watching was the casting of Max Cady. He's played by none other than Javier Bardem, who has proven his knack for villainy in such places as Skyfall and especially No Country for Old Men. The guy who played the cruel and sadistic Anton Chigurh could definitely play Max Cady.

Of course, since I became acquainted with all the primary cast members within about three seconds of each other the first time I saw any promotional materials for Cape Fear, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson played an equally significant role in my clicking play. I've always liked both actors, with Wilson being a special favorite of mine. CCH Pounder also has a role in this, as does a young actress who has really caught my attention in recent years, Lily Collias, who of course plays the role Juliette Lewis played in Scorsese's version. (Is Juliette Lewis in this also? Could be. No spoilers.)

I don't watch a lot of TV that I'm not also watching with my wife, but I like to have at least one series going for nights when it's just too late to start a movie. And because I've been really dragging my heels on finishing the series run of Mythic Quest, which has steadily lost interest for me over the course of its four seasons, I decided to give Cape Fear a whirl.

I won't say that it absolutely grabbed me from the first episode. I was positive on that episode, but not addicted. In fact it might have taken me two weeks before I watched episode 2. 

After that, I was watching one about every four nights, and there was one time I even watched episodes on consecutive nights.

Simply put, I could have never guessed how the combustible threat posed by Cady against the family of the lawyers who didn't properly defend him, leading to his 17-year prison term, could remain at such a high level of immediacy across so many episodes. And in case you need that threat to be goosed just a little bit, each episode begins with something sinister as a cold open, before Herrmann's score kicks in and the images on the screen are slowly superseded by the title. 

Needless to say, there's a lot more extra plot material here than in the previous movies. How much, if any, comes from the original novel, I'm not sure. But we learn a lot more about Cady's extended family, and burrow further into the lives of Anna and Tom Bowden and their children Zack and Natalie. I believe Zack is an addition to the family dynamic from the previous source material. Both children are in their late teens and they are both messed with by a woman who may or may not be Cady's daughter.

None of it feels like filler. All of it gives us a useful expansion on these characters, to care more about their ultimate fates and to learn more about what they may or may not be guilty of. The material is messy and complicated in the best possible ways. 

And you can get a lot of good stuff from the slow burn of a man who is trying to systematically destroy a family, both from without and from within. Cady lays traps that don't spring right away, and has plausible deniability on many of them. In fact, the show is clever enough to create times when we ask ourselves if Cady is actually the true source of the threat to this family, or whether some other combination of elements might be responsible. The show takes advantage of the fact that it comes out at a time when we no longer want to see monolithic evil depicted on screen, and every villain has a complicated backstory.

I was also fascinated by the casting choice of Bardem as Cady, because that changes him from a sort of southern redneck to a man with a Latin upbringing. As brilliant of an actor as he is, Bardem probably can't do an American accent, not without his Spanish accent creeping through. And so they just don't worry about it. What's more, they lean into it, as we see Max speaking Spanish in prison in flashback sequences. They just basically don't even worry about the fact that his other family members we meet -- who include a father played by Ron Perlman -- are not Latino in the slightest. I can't remember if there is an in-world explanation for why he has a different accent, but I'd say it is the equivalent of race blind casting. And I say "equivalent" rather than just "race blind casting" because race blind casting is usually ignoring someone's physical appearance, and the apparent anachronistic quality of it in a historical setting, while this is more about the actor's voice. So, race deaf casting?

I could probably go on more about the show. But all you really need to know is that I may not have been addicted at the start, but I was by the end. Any bumps along the way were small and soon forgotten. 

Obviously Cape Fear is not the first movie to be elongated into a TV show. It's not the 101st. It might not even be the 1,001st. But I don't usually watch these shows, so I thought it was worth spending a little time on this one. 

And that's especially because the thing that makes a film great, in comparison to a TV show of the same material, is its brevity. A great screenplay gives you an emotional connection to characters you've just met, even though it only has 100 pages of script to do so. Especially for someone with my proclivities, that economy should be prized over the lack of conciseness that's a luxury in a TV show, which might sprawl out over a dozen seasons. 

However, Cape Fear is proof that the extra time with the same material can also work, and work quite well. 

MIFF for the blind, and wilted rose

One of my most strangely cherished MIFF traditions doesn't actually have anything to do with MIFF as such. It has to do with keeping up with my normal viewing of new theatrical releases.

Because I don't want to entirely fall behind on what's actually in cinemas for the festival's 17-day run, I almost always try to go to one double feature that is a MIFF movie and a non-MIFF movie. 

It's a tradition that dates all the way back to 2016, the first year I went to more than just a handful of MIFF movies. I paired Embrace of the Serpent with the MIFF movie Certain Women on July 31st that year. In subsequent years, my non-MIFF double feature halves have included The Dark Tower (2017), Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), Ophelia (2019), skip a couple COVID years and a third year when I was out of the country during MIFF, Asteroid City (2023), It Ends With Us (2024), Alien: Romulus (2024) and Weapons (2025). So I haven't missed an eligible year in the ten years I've been doing it, and even had an unintentional bonus viewing in 2024, when I had to cram in a viewing of It Ends With Us in order to fulfill our obligation to review it. My critic attended an advanced screening, but then said he didn't know what he'd write about it. 

My original schedule for this year did not entail such a double feature, a grievous oversight in retrospect. I think it was in the interest of consolidating my MIFF screenings to result in fewer total days out of the house. But then I cancelled Tuesday night's viewing of Mile End Kicks in order to review it as part of my MIFF preview -- it was already available on my U.S. iTunes -- which opened up a spot on Tuesday before my expected MIFF viewing of Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada at 9 p.m.

How to fill this spot was something I went back and forth on for the few days leading up to it. I really wanted to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which would have been kind of an echo of MIFF 2024 when I watched I Saw the TV Glow as part of the festival. But another critic already reviewed this, so my editor's brain had me thinking about The End of Oak Street, which does not yet have a review. The latter, though, did not time up very well with the start of Rose of Nevada. I'd have to leave work early to get to a 4:30 showing, and then I would have more than two hours of downtime before Nevada -- not enough to get to another movie, but too much for just having dinner. Remembering my aimless downtime from the start of the festival, I opted for the perfectly timed 6 p.m. Camp Miasma.

Except it did not opt for me. After dinner at my favorite CBD Indian restaurant, I got to Cinema Kino, a usual MIFF venue that I otherwise wouldn't be attending this year, at about 10 to 6, only to find that the movie was sold out. If you were to ask me the last time I rocked up to a movie only to find no tickets available, I don't even know that I'd be able to produce an answer. I have to wonder if the general enthusiasm around MIFF was causing an uptick in other ticket sales during the same period, because Camp Miasma had already been out for ten days at this point. Only The Odyssey still sells out after ten days, and only in its more unique venues like IMAX and 70 mm.

For a second I thought about pivoting to One Night Only, but it didn't start for another full hour, and would almost certainly prevent me from getting to Rose of Nevada on time. The Invite matched up almost perfectly, but I've already seen that, and didn't want a second viewing just to kill time, even though I loved it.

But that was a lot of time to kill. Nearly three hours now. I had to do something. 

I started walking in the direction of the other CBD theater that takes my critics card, the Village at Crown Casino, for a One Night Only showing that also started at 6. But I had to get real with myself. It would take me almost a half-hour to walk there, and even if I lined up with public transportation just perfectly, at least 20 minutes by that route. Even with the extended ads and trailers that play at Village, I wouldn't get there on time.

I came to this realization right in front of ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which is also a MIFF venue. So I decided to see what was playing there.

Lo and behold, a 6:45 showing of a documentary called Joybubbles was not sold out. And given the movie's scant 79-minute running time, it was no threat to the start of Rose of Nevada. 

So hence arose my first-ever spontaneous MIFF purchase. The $31.50 price made me balk for half a second, but the opportunity for an unplanned 12th movie in my 11-movie 2026 schedule was too good to pass up, especially as a MIFF first. And you can't put a price on killing time.

Plus there's something beautiful about seeing a movie you didn't choose for yourself. It broadens your horizons and can lead to unexpected loves.

There was only one challenge about Joybubbles, though: It had audio description for the blind.

In the past I've vaguely noticed that such screenings exist at MIFF, but never bought a ticket to one, even accidentally. And it more than made sense in the context of this particular film.

See, Joybubbles is about a man of the same name, a blind man who changed his name, legally, to Joybubbles. Relying on his other senses to compensate for his lack of sight, as a boy in the 1950s he became very interested in telephones -- how they worked, and how they could allow him to connect with others. His perfect pitch whistling allowed him to whistle the tones necessary to call long distance for free, and it even earned him the attention of the police, including an arrest and trial. Later he managed to parlay this into a career in telecom.

I'm not sure if we had any actual blind people in our audience, but if we did, they were certainly well served by the accompanying audio description, which it is safe to say was a totally new experience for the rest of us. You could hear titters throughout the crowd as the movie started and the man providing the commentary track would describe even the production company logos on screen. Those of us who weren't laughing probably were thinking instead: "This is going to be a long 79 minutes."

You do get used to it, but it's quite odd. Example of what it was like: "A man walks down the sidewalk, running his hands through the plants along the side. Close-up of that man." 

Some of this was quite funny in and of itself. It requires this close to making actual judgments about what was appearing on screen. At one point, the commentary was something along the lines of "White boys are on telephones," and this was particularly funny because the commentator, or at least the person who wrote the commentary, had felt that the race of the boys was relevant in this case. We all laughed because in that moment we detected that there was a sense of privilege about what was being described. The commentator sounded like he might be Black, which might have made it a little funnier.

Fortunately, any time someone was talking, there was no commentary. So that meant that some of the images went undescribed, if they conflicted directly with spoken dialogue. But there was never any actual silence in the film, which is a strange phenomenon. The lack of someone speaking would allow the commentator not only to fill the space, but also possibly to catch us up on images that might have gone by a few moments earlier while someone was speaking. 

And then there were the things that were sort of hard to describe. Even though we had stopped laughing purely because of the novelty of it, we did laugh sometimes if the particular commentary taxed a person's descriptive abilities, such as a visual sequence that accompanies Joybubbles' experimentation with psychedelic drugs. I won't try to recreate the language used, but it was an attempt to describe shapes on screen, at one point comparing them to a lava lamp.

I'm glad I did get used to it, because the movie itself was the first of MIFF to receive four stars from me on Letterboxd. Usually that's not an issue with MIFF, which almost always puts at least one movie in my top ten for the year. (Last year it was two.) But even my previous favorite, The Fox, only received a favorable 3.5 stars from me, which I decided I could not quite nudge up to four. Anyway, needless to say I'm glad I saw Joybubbles, and got to know the unique Joybubbles.

Rose of Nevada, unfortunately, made me wish I'd prioritized seeing the non-MIFF movie in my double feature and not worried about the MIFF movie.

The director, Mark Jenkin, made a movie a couple years ago called Enys Men. It's a sort of nautical horror movie about a woman alone -- or at least we think she's alone -- on an island off the coast of England. It looks like it was made in the 1970s, as the vibe you'd get most from it is something like the original The Wicker Man. I'm not going to say it was an easy film to watch and I have mixed feelings about it, but the vibe was mostly positive, and it identified Jenkin as filmmaker whose next movie I wanted to see.

This one is a sort of leveling up for Jenkin, I suppose, as it features two actors you may know: George MacKay and Callum Turner. And I suppose it is technically more accessible than Enys Men, while also remaining in that same genre of nautical horror that looks like it was made in the 1970s.

But my God was this movie slow and boring. 

Just to give you a general plot overview, since I know this piece is running pretty long. MacKay and Turner play the crew of a Cornish fishing vessel, but this is no ordinary fishing vessel. Rose of Nevada actually went missing at sea some 30 years ago, and it has mysteriously shown up again, docked and ready to go, even with 30 years of rust. The story involves a reckoning with that lost vessel 30 years ago, which traumatized the local village and resulted in the eventual suicide of one of its surviving crew. Expect the supernatural and possibly even ... time travel?

I've just made the movie sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. Certainly Jenkin's style is slow and gradual and lacking a desire to give its audience definitive exposition, and I'm usually game for such an approach. But I needed this narrative to be a lot more propulsive, and when it does go for "blow your mind" moments, for my mind to be a lot more blown.

I have to acknowledge that discomfort could have factored into my experience. This was my third and I believe final screening at my favorite MIFF venue, the Capitol. But I ended up in a row that had a wood barrier cutting us off at the knees, which is a lot less forgiving than a row of seats. Fortunately there was no one seated to my left, but even with that, I still couldn't get my legs in a position that I could maintain for more than about three minutes before needing to shift again. The only real relief came when the guy to my right also moved seats, presumably for reasons of discomfort as well. This allowed me to cross my legs into the space he had been, and only then, with about 30 minutes remaining in the movie, did I finally achieve some semblance of comfort.

If I'm really into a movie, my discomfort becomes just dull background noise. But if the movie is slow and largely has no identifiable momentum toward a clear narrative climax, it can consume me.

Okay down to my final two MIFF nights, with an ambitious triple feature this Friday followed by one final film on Sunday. 

MIFF: CBD in the CBD and Damon Herriman's magical holes

If my goal with the subjects of my MIFF posts is to confuse you and make you want to read more, well, maybe this one takes the cake.

But before I explain it, I'll note that my third MIFF day -- this past Friday, after kicking off the festival last Friday and Saturday -- was, like the previous two, also a double feature. And like the previous two, both movies in that double feature were at the same venue, which is not at all usually the case with my MIFF double features. Usually I'm just lining up whatever I want to see and hoping that the time in between them is enough to get to the second one. With my 2026 MIFF double features, I knew it was enough, because they were one after another at the same venue. 

The major shift from the first four movies, though, was in language. My first four MIFF movies were all in a different one from my own: two in French, and one each in Mandarin and Japanese. The funny thing about those two in French, though, is that neither director is actually from France or another country where French is spoken. Parallel Tales' Asghar Farhadi hails from Iran, and The Diary of a Chambermaid's Radu Jude is Romanian. (And so, there is a small amount of Romanian in Chambermaid.)

The two movies on Friday night were both in English, and both hail from Australia, the only two such films I'm seeing at the festival. In fact, the next four are also in English, before we return to -- you guessed it -- French for the final film.

And Friday night's movies were both at the Capitol, my favorite MIFF venue, which otherwise never hosts commercial movies. So I've only ever seen MIFF movies there.

The place looks even more like an amazing spaceship from where I was sitting for the first movie, a lot farther back than I usually sit. The reason I sat so far back? Allocated seating, or as Americans would know it, assigned seating. I think that was a first for this venue, and they did it at both movies. 

In any case, here is that view:

But I haven't even told you what the movies were, or, as per my tradition, what I did before getting there.

Determined not to have as much unprogrammed time as I did before last Friday's double feature, I went shopping first for a USB fan, since the one I have at work died that very afternoon. There were times when I thought it might have been dead previously, when it just wouldn't start at all. But a well-placed smack on the side always got it going again. This time? It slowed down more and more until the blades were barely turning. That gave me the confidence to call a time of death.

I couldn't find a USB fan at Big W, but I used up enough time on the attempt that I almost found I'd fallen behind the pace. So I had to hurry to my current favorite restaurant in Chinatown -- in other words, the one I know has the dish I like so I don't bother to try any others -- and gobbled down this:

Yeah it's as yummy as it looks.

The service was so fast that I had plenty of time to stroll over to the Capitol -- enough, actually, that I succumbed to the wafting smells of a crepe stand on the way, especially inviting on a winter's night.

The first movie was Maddelin McKenna's Mad Rush, and this was its world premiere. In fact, it was such a "friends and family" type screening that I almost felt like I had walked into the wrong cinema. As various people spoke at a podium before the film -- including McKenna and her producer, Sarah Clayton -- there were concentrated cheers of adoring loved ones every time a name was dropped for one of the people involved in the production, most if not all of whom would have been there in the audience. It made me feel a slight twinge of guilt for seeing it as "just" your average punter, to use the Australian term, who thought the premise looked interesting and therefore stole a seat from someone who might have been more directly invested in it. (Though the seating capacity is pretty large, as you can probably tell from the picture above.)

That premise was that the lead actress you see above, Senuri Chanandri, plays an Australian woman named Madisha, who gets called by a scammer and marched around the Melbourne central business district while also going about the events of her day, including learning that her roommate intends to move out of their apartment, and running into a former coworker at the workplace from which she was just fired.  

And so this is where you get half the title above. I'm pretty sure this is the first MIFF film I've seen that was set primarily in the same neighborhoods where MIFF takes place, Melbourne's central business district, or CBD. And so yeah, I did get some enjoyment from pointing out familiar locales, some of which I had just walked through, which is a real rarity given the lack of movies set in Melbourne. In fact, Mad Rush may be the first movie where I've ever gotten to point out locations that were familiar to me from 13 years of living in this city.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a huge amount of enjoyment from the rest of the film, and I'm sorry to those filmmakers who may be reading this. (I like to think my blog doesn't actually get out there very far, but with a small movie like this just having its debut, I think it's possible if not likely that they will be reading this.) 

My chief complaint was that I found it very hard to relate to the main character, who shows the sort of gullibility in the face of an obvious scam that you might expect of a 75-year-old with Alzheimer's coming on. And I do know people in that position are susceptible to such scams, where they force you to a bank to withdraw your money while staying on the phone line during the whole process, because that sort of chicanery befell my mother, who indeed was showing the early signs of dementia. In her case it was a few years earlier than age 75.

But the character played by Chanandri is supposed to be about, I don't know, 28? What 28-year-old in Melbourne in 2026 does not have their radar up for obvious scams? I know scammers do their thing because it works on some people, but I don't feel like a 28-year-old, who is a bit lost but otherwise appears to be a person of intelligence, would just march around the city, withdrawing money and trying to get to places to wire it, because a trio of shady people on the other end of the phone line, who pass off to each other to continue trying to play good cop-bad cop with her, have told her to do so. It frustrates us in the way that characters who create their own problems frustrate us. The events of Mad Rush could have been avoided entirely if Madisha just said "Get fucked!" and hung up on them in the first instance.

If the film had at least reached a sort of conventional climax for a film like this, that would have been something, but it very much drifts off in the middle of a thought. I thought I even might have missed something at the end because I have to admit I did nod off for a second. I was almost prompted to ask someone in the lobby afterward, but my sense of decorum made me think better of it.

One interesting tie-in to my reality, though: I myself had just found the night before that I had been the victim of a scam, or rather, the victim of fraud. And maybe my own high alert to it was one of the reasons I didn't believe Madisha's reaction to it.

I won't bore you with all the gory details, but the previous Thursday night I'd gotten a weird text that was purporting to be from my bank asking me to verify a suspicious transaction. The formatting of the text seemed a bit off so I just said "Scam" and didn't really think about it again. 

But then the night before Mad Rush, I happened to mention it, and my wife and I checked our bank history. About $1,000 in small charges appeared against the account, between $10 and $23, that were listed as Australia Post. So I spent some time on the phone -- a lot less than I thought I would -- registering the fraud, which my bank will investigate and likely refund. They had me cut up my card and will be issuing a new one. And that's the first time a thing like that has ever happened to me.

I should have checked the account at the time to make sure this text had no basis in reality, and in fact, I do think the text was part of the scam, and not actually from my bank. But just because the text was a scam, it doesn't mean there wasn't something really going on. 

I think my own reaction to this text, just dismissing it as a scam immediately, is part of the reason I didn't buy Madisha's willingness to take these mysterious callers at face value. Yes, even though they talked about this being the only way to secure the safety of her finances, I just didn't believe that a smart 28-year-old would fall for the sort of scheme that's targeted at the oldest and most infirm in our society.

In between my movies, I had a caramel macchiato at the Starbucks next door while writing an email reply to a friend who had been due one for about ten days. I also did my Duolingo Japanese lesson for the day and snacked up for the second movie, which began about an hour after the first one got out.

And this one I liked a lot more. The Fox is also Australian but stars Australians you've heard of: Jai Courtney, Emily Browning, Claudia Doumit, Damon Herriman and Miranda Otto. Though those are only the on-screen talent. There are talking animals in this movie, one of whom, a magpie, is claimed by Australians even though he's Kiwi (Sam Neill), and the other of whom, the titular fox, is a Brit (Olivia Colman.)

In fact, while we're on the subject of Neill:

If you can't read what that says, it says "This session is dedicated to the memory of Sam Neill. Forever in film."

Although this was not the premiere, the director, Dario Russo, spoke here too. 

There are some surprises that I may have to spoil in order to explain the other intriguing half of my subject.

Courtney plays a small-town farmer who has proposed to his girlfriend, played by Browning, who is not happy at all, but accepts his proposal because a whole pub is looking on when he makes it. (And she's right -- he may not be the worst guy in the world, but he's not fulfilling her needs at all.) It becomes hard for him to ignore the evidence that she's sleeping with her boss (Herriman), also not a great guy, and one night, while hunting a fox who has been eating his chickens, he's got the fox dead to rights. Only he doesn't kill her, because the fox starts speaking to him, and telling him of a magical hole in the ground that can make his girlfriend, who has already started trying to end the engagement, more compliant. All he has to do is throw her into it.

I don't need to tell you what ensues, but I can tell you that a lot of it is very funny, and the funniest part may be the foul-mouthed magpie played by the dearly departed Neill. He's always trying to get somebody to get him a chicken in exchange for not ratting them out for something they've done. That magpie is a right bastard and he's hilarious.

So let's talk about the magical holes.

If you don't know Herriman, you probably should. He's played Charles Manson in multiple projects, most notably Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and has crossed over in other ways that I'm not bothering to check right now.

The role that's relevant to The Fox, and to the title of this post, is his role in my favorite movie of last year, Michael Shanks' Together. 

If you haven't seen Together, you are probably still familiar with the premise, which is that the two main characters (played by real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie) find themselves involved in a phenomenon where mysterious forces are causing their bodies to begin fusing together. 

And where do they contract this weird phenomenon? Oh, it just happens to be a hole in the ground in the woods that they stumble into.

I just thought it was funny that Herriman would be in movies two years in a row that involve holes in the ground where people emerge quite changed after falling in. And I won't tell you how this hole changes these people, because that would be a spoiler, and The Fox is good enough not to spoil. In fact, I believe it's now my favorite of the six MIFF I've seen in 2026.

The next will be on Tuesday, when I've got just one film, but only because I had to cancel the other half of that double feature, having already watched the second movie I planned to watch (Mile End Kicks) in order to write my MIFF preview. The movie I am seeing is Rose of Nevada, from director Mark Jenkin, who directed Enys Men.

Adorable senior citizens

Not everyone can grow old gracefully. 

Those that can? They can be quite adorable.

Last night I watched The Dink, the pickleball movie, in which 73-year-old Mary Steenburgen plays a potential love interest for 48-year-old Jake Johnson. I say "potential" because, without spoiling anything, it doesn't go down exactly as you might expect. And though they describe it as a 30-year age difference, I suspect that is more the flattery to Johnson of aging him down than aging Steenburgen up. 

It reminded me of a similar potential relationship in the movie Hello My Name is Doris between a character played by Sally Field, who was then 68, and a character played by Max Greenfield, who was then 35.

Why did these two potential relationships feel almost plausible?

Because Steenburgen and Field are both actresses who have mostly let their faces do what it's supposed to do when they age, and as a result, have maintained all the expressiveness and all the goofy charm that caused us to find them so appealing when they were ingenues.

People who have lots of work done usually don't maintain the same type of command over their actor's tools, and seem a lot older a lot sooner than these two.

It would be pretty boring if my main reason for writing this post was to say "actresses shouldn't have work done," which is a pretty tired observation and which has sort of come around the bend nowadays to involve actual body shaming. Not only boring, but also a bit problematic. 

No, I'm writing it mostly because I hadn't seen Steenburgen in anything in a while and I was amazed to find that she still seems as young and spry as she has for her whole career. And that her aging doesn't seem to be occurring at the pace I thought it should.

Even back when she appeared in Step Brothers in 2008, and I guess would have been 55 at the time, I thought of her as a bit of an adorable senior citizen, remarkably well preserved and as nimble a comedienne as she ever was. I guess I was the one aging her up back then. 

Maybe it's just that Steenburgen has always been in roles that were intended for a slightly older actress. I suppose playing the mother to Will Ferrell, who is only 14 years younger than she is, in Step Brothers tended to accentuate that. Even with her being a love interest for Doc Brown way back in 1990 in Back to the Future III, at only age 37,she seemed older then, in part because she was matched up with Christopher Lloyd, who is 15 years older than she is. Not that that sort of age gap is uncommon between a man and a woman in Hollywood.

I think I might be rambling a bit. 

The point is, Steenburgen can make us believe that spring chicken Jake Johnson might fall for her because she is still bringing oodles of charm to the screen and is still the sort of person you yourself might fall for, in part because she's just so adorable. 

I guess that's enough of a reason to post during a week when I've again been busy and not producing a lot of other interesting observations.

Needless expirations

I'm sure this isn't the sort of publicity the nice publicist wanted for the French film The Party's Over!, which I will be reviewing in the coming weeks. Then again, the idea that my little blog qualifies as any sort of actual "publicity" is somewhat humorous. 

The thing I'm writing about today doesn't have anything to do with this movie in particular or even, likely, with this publicist. It's a funny methodology baked into their way of getting screeners to critics, and even then it is not a big deal, as you will see -- just one of those minor inefficiencies that I liked to talk about on my blog.

Namely: They're expiring the screeners a lot earlier than they need to.

Back on July 31st, I agreed to review The Party's Over! for its eventual August 27th release. That seemed like ages away, so I thought I'd just get something in my back pocket to tackle as I saw fit over the next month.

When I went to casually check on it yesterday, I noticed the screener was set to expire that very day. So, I immediately had my evening's viewing plans sorted.

When I went to watch it starting at just after 10 -- not an ideal time to start a movie, but that's my reality these days -- the password would not work on it. It didn't tell me the screener was expired, just that the password was wrong.

I determined that they must be one in the same when I went to my email and saw a new email from the publicist, from just two hours earlier, telling me that the screener had expired and did I want him to send me a new one, and then also to let him know when and if I post a review. ("If"? I didn't know "if" was an option.)

A bunch of things going on here:

1) The screener shouldn't have expired. If you say something is expiring on August 10th, that should mean August 10th at 11:59 p.m. That should mean you can watch it at any time on August 10th.

2) Why expire a screener for a movie that's not set to come out for another 17 days? Aren't most people not going to watch and review the film until much closer to its release date?

3) If he's already asking after the review, does that mean he wishes I'd already posted it? Wouldn't you rather have someone read a review when they are within just a couple days of actually being able to buy a ticket? Out of sight, out of mind, right?

When I get my next screener, I'll be curious to see how quickly they expire it. And I'll be sure not to let that happen. Regardless of whether it should even be happening or not. 

MIFF: Duelling masters at my MIFF Astor debut

Asghar Farhadi and Hirokazu Kore-eda have a shared lineage in my personal film history as well as my personal MIFF history.

Both had a film in the early part of last decade that bowled me over, the first I had seen by the director in each case. For Farhadi, it was A Separation, my #1 of 2011. For Kore-eda, it was Like Father, Like Son, my #2 of 2014 (though its release year was 2013 in Japan). 

Both then popped up regularly at MIFF, each time feeling like a slam dunk in terms of films I wanted to be sure I got on my schedule. In the case of Farhadi, that meant seeing The Salesman in 2016 and Everybody Knows in 2018. With Kore-eda, I saw After the Storm in 2016, Shoplifters in 2018 and Monster in 2023. And in each case, only one of their films I saw was not in the very upper reaches of my list that year, as Everybody Knows was my #3 of 2018, and Shoplifters and Monster finished #11 and #4 of their respective years.

If Kore-eda got ahead of Farhadi, it's only because Kore-eda is prolific and Farhadi is not, though Farhadi is also from a country that punishes filmmakers for defying the government. In fact, MIFF in 2016 and 2018 both featured a film from each director. I'm not going to say they synched up like women spending a lot of time together and getting on the same cycles for their period, but if you want to say that, I won't disagree with you.

When I heard both directors were again having a film in 2026, I knew I had to get tickets for both. And when I learned both films were playing on the same day, a plan started to take shape.

And when I learned both films were playing, six hours apart, at the Astor Theatre on Saturday, August 8th, a plan really started to take shape.

You see, this would be my first time attending the Astor as part of MIFF. About damn time, I'd say.

The Astor Theatre is an old single-screen movie house in South Yarra with a ton of history. I don't see a lot of movies there, in part because it specializes in repertory screenings, in part because it does not take my critics card, and in part because of its location (more on that in a moment). But it's the place I saw The Hateful Eight in its properly projected 70 mm format, and I've seen a few repertory titles there as well. It's the kind of place you feel like it's a treat to attend.

The reason I don't go to its MIFF showings? Well, it's not in the CBD.

The benefit most MIFF venues have -- outside of the regional Victoria screenings -- is that you can ping pong between a half-dozen different theaters in Melbourne's central business district. If you are trying to go to two back to back, you need at most about 25 minutes to hoof it between the theaters, even if it's between the IMAX at the Melbourne Museum (where I saw I Saw the TV Glow a few years ago) and ACMI, which are probably the two venues most distant from each other.

You can't hoof it to the Astor at all. South Yarra is at best a train ride from the CBD, and enough of a train ride that you couldn't make it there after another movie in the CBD unless you had at least an hour between the two showings. Not that it would take you an hour, necessarily, just that you'd want to allow that much time to make sure nothing went wrong. After all, mechanized transport is outside of your control the way travelling on foot is not. You wouldn't feel good planning a night around it, in any case.

But two showings on a Saturday, when the CBD doesn't even need to enter to it? Now that was something I could go for.

Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box was playing at noon, and Farhadi's Parallel Tales was playing at 6. So all I had to do was leave my house around 11 to make sure I had plenty of time to get there, and then bring some stuff with me to kill the 3+ hours between the two movies. And because South Yarra and neighboring St. Kilda are nice places to spend an afternoon, it sounded quite nice to just make a day of it -- unlike the night before, when my MIFF downtime was more nebulous and unsatisfying.

So I found parking more easily than I thought, though only between movies could I confirm that I had, indeed, parked legally, and that there wasn't a ticket waiting for me. I know the general rule of thumb is that if you can't see a street sign that speaks to how long you can park, you can park there forever, but my spot was only a few blocks from the Astor, so it seemed too good to be true.

My first impression of the Astor, which I had not attended in any form (could it be?) for almost ten years, is that it was an heir apparent to the Comedy Theatre (which no longer shows MIFF movies) in terms of the comfort of the seats. Which is to say, no comfort at all. Like that other theater, the Astor seems to have most of its original fixtures, including hard wrought-iron seats with cushions that hardly meet the definition. The bigger problem, for a tall guy like me, was that there was no good place between the seats in the row in front to wedge my foot, which I often need to do during a movie. Suffice it to say that I learned my lesson in the first movie, and in the second one, opted for a chair that had no row in front of it, and plenty of room to stretch my legs.

And so started Sheep in the Box, which was, sadly, firmly in the lower half of the nine Kore-eda films I've seen. 

The director is known as a humanistic director of realistic family dramas, which places him as an heir to Ozu, though I don't know if that thought is original to me. In saying that, I forget that one of the first films he ever made, After Life, was about a posthumous bureaucratic waystation, making it not realistic in the slightest. However, let's just say that all his other films I've seen are safely within the bounds of the realism of our present day world.

Sheep in the Box deviates from that in that it is set in the near future, where drone delivery has become common, and refrigerators try to keep you to your diet. And unfortunately, its actual subject is derivative in a way a film by Kore-eda rarely is. 

The film is basically Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, if it was made by a Japanese director who liked realistic modern-day films that are humanistic at their core. It imagines a company that can make replacements for your loved ones, specifically your children, should they die prematurely, and it invites all the familiar questions of whether an AI can have a soul and the capacity to love -- and whether we have the capacity to love it in return.

I'm not going to say this film is clumsy, nor that it isn't mildly touching in spots. But my concern was that Kore-eda doesn't do enough with the ideas that I personally first remember thinking about in AI, especially given that the 25 years since AI have featured a lot of other variations on that theme, particularly in the last five years. Nearly every director is freaking out about AI these days, and I guess I just don't feel like Kore-eda has ever, in his career, done what "nearly every director" is likely to do. He brings his own touch to it, to be sure, but it wasn't enough for me, and the film went on for 20 minutes longer than I thought it should.

After checking to be sure I didn't get a parking ticket -- and that was just for my ease of mind, since I wouldn't have bothered to move it once I'd already gotten the ticket -- I continued walking in that direction to St. Kilda, which took another 30 minutes or so of walking. Which was good, because I needed to get my steps in for the day.

I got to a cafe just as it was about to close, but not before they made me a flat white and an almond croissant. (They didn't make the croissant fresh. They already had it.) I noodled around on my computer while enjoying these, and would have liked to linger longer, except that people want to get out of there ASAP when they close their cafe for the day. They didn't rush me, but I rushed myself.

So then I spent another hour-and-a-half on the beach. This was really nice, as I set myself up at a picnic table for a restaurant that was closed, meaning they weren't using it. They didn't rope off their seating area, so I didn't feel like I was trespassing or anything. And I took my shoes off and kneaded my feet in the sand, which added to a sense of relaxation. I caught up on more computer stuff, including writing part of yesterday's post about my first night of MIFF. Sooner than I imagined, it was time to get back, especially if I wanted to grab a kebab on my way back for my dinner.

I again arrived in plenty of time and even ran into someone I knew in the lobby of the Astor. I caught up with him a little bit about film and MIFF in general, though I then extricated myself, because he was with a friend and I didn't want to be a third wheel. 

Farhadi's Parallel Tales, like Sheep in the Box, was a bit of a deviation for the director. We say we want our favorite directors to expand their repertoire and not limit themselves, but do we really? I'm not so sure.

At its core, the film still has the sort of "he said she said" social dynamics of what I have often referred to as the domestic thrillers he makes, whose conflicts arise from semantics and misunderstandings. That's there in this film, but it's a bit more high concept, which I didn't think suited him as well. And sadly, the film, set in Paris, contains zero Iranian content. 

I thought the first character we meet, played by Adam Bessa, might be Iranian by heritage, but IMDB says nothing about that. He's "just" a Frenchman, it would appear. And we know the others are French, because they are played by such French legends as Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Huppert and (in just one scene) Catherine Deneuve. 

It's not the first time Farhadi has made films outside Iran, though The Past at least contained Iranian characters. Everybody Knows does not contain any Iranian characters and is set in Spain, but in that case, I don't know, it just worked for me. (I'm sure Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz had something to do with that.)

This one? I missed the Iranian connection for sure. It felt like "just" a French film, which was not what I was looking for.

And the meta story worked for me only sporadically as well. Without going into too much of a synopsis, let's just say Huppert plays an aging writer whose publisher (Deneuve) tells her her books are old-fashioned and won't sell. So she essentially throws out her current manuscript, which is a love triangle based on what she imagines is happening in an apartment across the way in which the two men and one woman produce foley work for films. Adam, the character played by the aforementioned Adam Bassa, is an ex-con who has been hired to be sort of an assistant to the aging writer, and he essentially fishes the manuscript out of the trash and passes it off as his own. He uses it has an excuse to meet the female foley artist, who has caught his fancy, and a "life imitates art" situation arises out of her imagined story in the manuscript and the actual reality of the three foley artists.

Parallel Tales deserves more than that quick synopsis if we want to pull apart everything it's doing, but I've got to be honest with you: I've got to go make dinner.

Suffice it to say that although the film grew on me as it went, and I found there to be some interesting elements in how the story wraps up, before then I did not get enough of a sense of what makes this distinctly an Asghar Farhadi film. Like, I wouldn't say I was surprised if you told me he'd directed it, but that certain something that has allowed almost all of his films to profoundly impact me -- save the aforementioned The Salesman -- just wasn't present here in the quantity I wanted it to be.

Okay, I now have almost a week off from MIFF before I return for another double feature next Friday. Back to our regular programming for a few days. 

MIFF: Expensive hamburgers and long downtimes

It used to be that when I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival, I felt like the time between when my work gets out and when the first film starts was full of food, errands, and other activities that only enhanced the experience of watching a pair of movies before the end of the night. Walking through the city on a brisk winter night, it felt like the world was my oyster.

For my first MIFF movies of 2026, well, there was a lot of thumb twiddling and downtime. 

I don't know whether it had to do with leaving work earlier than I usually do on a MIFF night (in other words, on time, rather than staying late) or a later start time for the first movie (6:45), but I found myself with more than an hour after I finished eating but before the movie started, during which I had no idea what to do with myself. (I ended up messing around on my computer unproductively, which was pretty unsatisfying.)

And before that, I spent a fortune on burgers.

Five Guys is a burger concept that began taking off in the U.S. right around the time I was leaving back in 2013. I assume the chain existed long before then -- in fact, the internet tells me it started up in 1986. But I'm guessing it was one of those things that was regional for at least the first 20 years of its existence, before it finally started creeping to areas I lived.

Anyway, I never tried it before moving, and only in the past year or so have I noticed there are restaurants open here. Fancying myself a bit of a burger connoisseur -- or at least the less sophisticated sounding "lover of burgers" -- I had been wanting to check it out.

But a number of times in a row now, I've gone to my favorite ramen place after work but before a movie, and when I continued walking on, it was only then that I remembered the Five Guys was just two doors down. This happened most recently on Wednesday when I went to see Ice Cream Man. 

Only two days later, it was easy to remember that I wanted to try Five Guys, so I took out a second mortgage on my house and bought a burger, shake and fries. 

The main sticker shock came from the burger, which was priced at either $26.50 for the bigger one or $24.50 for the smaller one. Now I should say that this wasn't just the plain burger, it was a bacon cheeseburger -- I could have gotten the plain one for a few dollars less. But I decided if I wanted to give Five Guys a real shot, I should get the sort of burger I would normally order, and that would have bacon on it. 

During a little banter with the checkout woman over the price -- very jovial on my side, I can assure you -- she explained that it was the ability to add as many as ten extra toppings, free of charge, that made the burger more expensive. I say, keep your toppings and charge me $3 less for the burger.

In the same vein of wanting to give the place a fair shot, I also ordered a small fries and a peanut butter milkshake.

It was all fine.

In fact, everything was pretty big, especially the "small" fries. Maybe they inherited the sizes from the U.S. too. So I don't really feel like I didn't get enough food for the $40 (!) in total I spent on it. 

But the reality is, it didn't make my toes curl with its special mixture of flavors, and so I can just as easily say that this is probably both my first and last Five Guys visit. Not because I would never eat there again, but because the prices are just so inflated that I'd rather have a nice Chinese sit down meal in neighboring Chinatown (which I also plan to do during MIFF) than fast food burgers for the same price.

The slightly less than satisfying meal was followed immediately by the realization that I had too much time and not enough to do. Sometimes when I'm in this situation, I go and lie on the lawn outside the State Library, but they had it fenced off to allow the grass to recover from the footsteps of 10,000 feet. So I ended up just sitting on a bench next to it, a bit glumly, with my computer. After about five minutes, six police officers started some very elongated and gentlemanly arrest proceedings for a motorcyclist who had no plates and a suspended license. He ended up sitting right next to me on the bench. I might have moved except the whole thing was, in fact, very civilized.

When it finally came time for the movies, I didn't like either of the first two movies as much as I would have liked. 

The first was my annual choice for "outsider animation," of which I try to get at least one every year. (In fact, I prefer it to be exactly one, but there is another coming later in this festival.) It's from China and is called Light Pillar, and though I enjoyed a lot of the experience of watching it, halfway through I decided I was glad I wouldn't be reviewing it. (Forgetting, of course, that I planned to give you a mini review here.)

There isn't much in the way of narrative, but the film takes place largely in the winter and at a basically abandoned movie studio somewhere in China. We see the staff do mundane activities like lean against walls, smoke cigarettes, and suck drops of snot back up their nose. (One character is doing this every time we see him, which is unnerving.) Their overlord bosses -- really just middle management functionaries, one of whom is never seen without a microphone, even when it doesn't make any sense for him to have one -- come through and try to inspire them by telling them that this year, they will get paid every three months rather than every six. Guilted into lackluster applause over this, the employees applaud with zero enthusiasm.

We follow one guy, who seems to be a wallflower teenager, and talks just about as much as anyone, which is to say, almost none at all. Small laugh-out-loud absurdities occur all over the place, including, for example, the fact that there is a Roomba that lines up along with the rest of the employees, and wordlessly engages in the same activities they engage in. The director, Zao Xu, has captured a great sense of a mouldering future, where everything is dingy but the technology is advanced enough that you realize it isn't quite right now. The fact that snow is covering everything makes it even more desolate and lonely, though I suppose, if you are of the right mindset, oddly cozy as well.

The "hook" of this setup is that our main character has an escape from this dreary dead-end world through a VR headset, and when he goes into the VR world, it's our world. Or, not exactly our world as this is also quite expressionistic, and filmed so. But it's live action, and in this version of the world, he can come to life a bit, he can venture toward another online character who interests him, and he can try to become the best version of himself. 

What I would have said in a review if I'd written one is that this is a clever setup, but the animated world is so drily funny and rich that we feel a little bit disappointed anytime we see real human actors, even if this is undeniably adding thematic dimension and distinctiveness to the project. I'd have also said that I started off kind of loving this film, and as it became clear to me that it wasn't going to have a satisfying payoff, I became increasingly uncertain about my own reaction. I am also having strange difficulty remembering all the details of it, which could have been the result of nodding off every once in a while. So it feels a bit like a dream, but a dream that I mostly enjoyed.

After another hour's break in which I loaded back up on drinks and snacks for the second movie, I returned upstairs into Hoyts Melbourne Central -- it occurs to me that I hadn't named the venue previously -- for my second of a Hoyts double feature. And if the whole first evening was a bit sluggish, that could be because Hoyts is kind of a disappointing place to start MIFF. It's not one of the unique venues that only get used for movies during MIFF, which presumably have other uses that keep them in business during the rest of the year. Hoyts is just a regular movie theater multiplex that I visit to see regular movies, having just seen The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day there, and it doesn't feel very festivalish. 

So the 9:15 movie was Radu Jude's The Diary of a Chambermaid. If you don't recognize that name, Jude is the latest Romanian sensation whose film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World perplexed me more than it seemed to perplex most people, and whose Dracula I haven't seen yet. (He also directed the provocatively named Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which I also haven't seen.) Even though I didn't particularly care for End of the World, it did indicate to me that Jude's films were ones I wanted to grapple with, which is why I prioritized this one. 

There's nothing as audacious in this adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel as the 40-minute unbroken take of a safety video that ends End of the World, but that's not to say there is nothing convention-breaking in this otherwise fairly straightforward film. The film is conceived as a satire of class politics in Paris, where a Romanian maid is looking after an upper-class family while earning enough money to send back to her daughter and mother in Romania. And at most of the points, Jude is content to let little telling moments speak for greater indignities, in a way that is fundamentally based in realism.

The break from conventions comes from interspersed stage performances of Mirbeau's original novel. These do have a literal existence in the narrative of the movie, since the lead character (played by Ana Dumitrascu) has been cast playing the titular chambermaid. Some of these scenes are wild, ostentatious and overtly sexual portrayals of what I have subsequently learned are actual plot developments in the novel, such as a man's sexual fixation on the boots of his chambermaid. These are played loudly and with some intent to discomfit us. The chambermaid also has some narrative asides when she's telling stories to the Parisian boy she's looking after.

Still, it always returns to the spine of the story, which is the way her employers use and abuse her in passively aggressive ways, in order to bring about what's best for them even if it's worst for her. To his credit, Jude doesn't exaggerate any of these, he just lets the actual way upper-class Parisians would handle this -- aware of the need to not come across as monsters, but only just -- speak for itself. The story takes place, sort of in the diary format of the title, in the three months leading up to Christmas. And if you think this woman is going to get back to Romania for Christmas to see her daughter the way she promised, well, that's probably not going to go exactly as planned.

I was getting a little bit of Jeanne Dielman from this at first, but I brushed that away as a stretch ... until I saw the poster you see above. It can't be a coincidence that it looks so similar to this, can it?

In any case, Chambermaid is less than half the length at only 94 minutes. 

I definitely liked The Diary of a Chambermaid better than End of the World, but I think I might have gone for it even more if it did not have such an abrupt ending. And I don't mean an ending that doesn't work out for the protagonist, I mean an ending that seems to come without a resolution one way or another. I suspect for a rule breaker like Jude, that might have been the point, but I still think that actual ending needed to be rethought. It doesn't even end on a moment of dramatic irony, which I thought would have been our bare minimum expectation.

Okay, back at it tomorrow with another two movies to wrap up a busy first weekend.